Let’s Talk – Blue Reflection – Heart To Heart

This is one of those games that, at a glance, attracted me. I’m not sure why. Nothing about it seemed spectacular, and after playing through it, there still isn’t much note-worthy to say about that. So why then, did I choose to play this over something a little more major such as Fire Emblem: Echoes Of Valencia, Ys VIII (which I’m still playing through at the time of this writing.) and the like?

The answer is, even I’m not sure.

Let’s get started with the surface look. Blue Reflection is a semi-Persona-esque game, but instead of a teenaged male invoking mythical demons and deities from your inner self, you’re a teenaged girl that gains mystical powers after delving into another world based on human emotions.

Persona with magical girls. That’s a sentence I’d never thought I’d say or write. But here we are.

Graphically speaking, everything looks great. Environments and characters are rendered nicely, there’s a realistic type of physics to movement (more or less. Some outliers may apply), and never once did I think that something could be better placed at one area, or that something didn’t fit.

… That’s about where that ends, though. This game had very limited production value, and it shows. While environments are nice to look, physically speaking, there isn’t much to cover or do in them. Lighting is a little weird in some instances (namely where sun is shining directly on characters in cutscenes, or when in the Fear zone in The Common), and the animations…

The animations are where it really shows. Most of the time, they come off stilted and have no fluidity or transitions. Even facial expressions on occasion, make me want to go “Damnit, FEEL!” at Hinako. This is one of the places where the game suffered the most, and it’s a shame.

The second downpoint is the overall plot. It plays completely straight with little to no mystery outside of the Citrus Sisters themslves. Even when you get your answers near the end of the game, you don’t care. Not about the grand scheme of things at any rate. This is where I think the game shows it’s Persona/Atelier side the most. You don’t care about the plot or story, you care more about the characters. You want to see these people have a happier ending and more importantly, by the end, you want everything to work out for Hinako.

Because in this game, the main story is a means to an end. It’s focused around Hinako and the friends she ends up making during the course of it and how they, ultimately, help make her a slight bit happier with her circumstances in life. Which is unfortunately where the lack of animation variation and smoothness sells it all a bit short, along with the occasional flubbing of double/triple checking on the translation. It’s not Megaman X6 levels of terrigood, but Koei Tecmo sort of dropped the ball here.

To give credit where due, this game tugged my emotions a fair bit. That’s not something games typically do to me. To also give credit, I thought the actual story was paced pretty well up until the final parts anyway. It’s structured as though I would be playing an actual episode from an anime, which I think worked in the game’s favor a bit.

The final downpoint is the gameplay:

Repititive.

That one word summed it all up.

Each mission in the game either revolves around you killing enemies or picking up items in The Common. It does not change at all throughout the entire game. On occasion, you’ll have crafting missions that have you making a couple items and showing them to a person, but that’s all the flavor you’re going to get from this gameplay: Kill, Gather, Craft, Repeat.

Which would be fine in a MMO type of setting. Not in a game revolving around magical girls and their school life.

And the other thing I should mention: Combat, unless forced, is optional.
There’s no experience or money to gain from fights. Your “growth” levels are tied solely to story progression, and hanging out with your friends.
Which is something I’d wish they add into the Persona series to make them more of a means to an end rather than mere Fusion boosting, but, well, baby steps.

However, because ultimately 90% of all fights are optional, it can make combat feel more like a chore than an experience. Not a good feeling to have in a RPG of all things, but on the flip side, there is basically no grinding for levels in the game. The other downside to that is that encounters also aren’t very interesting and devolve to the same strategies over and over again. When the most challenging thing in the game is an optional boss, mainly for reasons beyond your control, there’s something slightly wrong with your design.

Though this does let me go back into what I thought were good things about the game. The battle system is one of the best things I’ve seen. It’s an evolution from Atelier Iris 2’s system to the extreme; you have an extensive Timeline (which acts as a not-ATB gauge), your party on one side, the enemy on the other. Each attack and ability has different waits to it, and it’s your goal to figure out how to best destroy the things in front of you without letting them getting too many attacks in. There’s a lot of option available in here for something that ultimately doesn’t matter, which impresses me. If only I could do something more with it! It gets even better when the game adds in things to do between turns to minimize your actual downtime. It’s an incredible system that I certainly want to see come back in some form or another.

Finally, the music tracks in the game. Most of them are more quiet tracks, which are either peaceful or melodramtic. They are very Atelier-ish, not only in composition, but also in the fact that unless you’re specifically trying to listen to them, they are more or less just background and not overly intrusive. The title screen music is very relaxing, however, and I would recommend tracks such as At The Speed Of Calm and A Destiny Called My Own for your daily listening needs. This game loves the piano about as much as I Am Setsuna does, and I love it for it.

And then you get into a battle and the game blasts the most upbeat and energetic piece to snap you out of that lazy relaxation. OVERDOSE (literally. It’s literally named this) probably claimed a list in my “current” top battle themes by force. I may have- *cough*- overlistened to it by a fair bit.
… Listening to the title theme (simply called BLUE REFLECTION) is making me want to cry again. I better wrap this up.

Ultimately, this game gave me a similiar longing after finishing it that Fairy Fencer F did. There is good and bad, which leveled it out to be a pretty average experience, but there is so much missed potential, so much that could have been done, that it sort of hurts. And while I was a little more fulfilled with this game than with Fairy Fencer, this is also the type of game that most likely will not see a sequel of any calibur, so there’s not much chance of seeing improvements to this. But should the case ever present itself:

Add more variety to the mission structure, spruce up the animation quality a fair bit, place in a bit more to do in the gameplay fields, bring up the main plot a notch. And for fluff’s sake, invest in some English voice acting.

Blue Reflection is the case of a game where, for where it’s strong in, it shines, and for where it stumbles, it’s very noticable. I like it well enough where I would recommend that someone at least give it one playthrough, but it’s an incredibly hard sell at sixty dollars for what it ultimately a 30-40 hour experience. It doesn’t overstay it’s welcome compared to most other RPGs in recent times, but it’s also a case of where being left to want more can be considered a bad thing.

If you are so interested, you can grab the game on Playstation 4, the Vita or off Steam. Again, incredibly hard to sell this at $60 for what all it offers, so perhaps wait until around $40 or so…
But until the next time I write something, the Citrus Sisters and I wish you farewell.